Mike S. [late night posting, to be edited later]

"I just don't think I beleive in this 12-step stuff... I mean, I believe in some of it," Mike said outside of the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. I had just delivered he and 12 other patients to a small church a couple miles from the clinic.

"I was pretty damn skeptical too until I came here. Which steps do you believe in," I asked.

"Well, the first," he said. "I believe I am an addict and am powerless over drugs. I just don't believe in the God stuff. I'm not religious."

We talked about our own religious background, both near-pentacostal, and how that had soured our taste for religion permanently.

"Do you believe there is a power greater than yourself," I asked him.

"No, I don't believe in a spiritual higher power."

"That's not what I asked. Some people in here talk about God as meaning "Group of Drunks," which I think is pretty clever. A group is bigger than yourself. Is an army bigger than a single person?"

He agreed. He countered that that was merely power...

I told him that was the basis of the second step... that there was a power greater than oneself - the same self that was admitidly powerless over addiction. Using a power greater than oneself as a tool was the only salvation for an addict. Just as an army is more powerful than the single soldier who alone cannot win a war, a group of recovering addicts is more powerful than the single addict trying every morning to be clean.

Unconvinced, I walked him to the front door of the church. Afterwards, I walked back to the van. I like giving the patients some time alone without the staff watching. It's not my place to be in their anyway...

What's odd about that conversation was the sheer lunacy of me defending a program I feel robbed me a year ago this week. On my birthday, my girlfriend of nearly two years cheated on my at an Al Anon convention in Orlando that she was a speaker for. That I didn't "speak the language" of The Program was the primary reason sourced before she asked me if I could find her recovering addict of a new boyfriend a job. Like everything in this world, perhaps it's just that The Program needs to be taken in moderation such that the power greater than yourself doesn't dominate everything in your life...

Nate S. [new late night post, more editing]

“My name is Nate, and I’m addicted to anything that gets me high.” There’s usually a small bout of clapping after that, slightly disorienting to any newbie in the AA or NA program. Nate is a man with a lot of addictions, one of the walking testimonies that addiction is a singular disease with a hundred paths.

He’s from the outskirts of town, one of several formally isolated communities getting swallowed up in urban sprawl. He has a wife and a beautiful little girl, both of whom I’ve met twice now. The first time was running in to look at the schedule and the second was today when I helped him load his groceries into my work van.

He was being transferred over to the PHP apartments after spending nearly three weeks in detox getting the heroin, crack, and meth out of his system. His attitude had changed a lot sense I first met him. We joked on the ride over to PHP about him calling me the “fun police” after catching him trying to cheat phone policy.

“I just hope my wife sees it.”

We joked the day before about how he needed to get his wife the biggest diamond in town for their next big anniversary. She waited three years for him to get out of prison for selling an ounce and a half of cocaine to a narc.

“That was the first time I sold to anyone outside my circle of friends… first time. Always happens like that, ya know?”

He was sober for a year and a half after that. He completely threw himself to the church. Then he slipped. He fell harder than he ever had before.

The catalyst to him coming here was his wife sending their daughter into the garage him get high. He’d snap at her and tell her to get back into the house.

She finally left him. She could handle being without him for three years in prison but couldn’t take him getting high inside the house with their daughter there.

He spent a week getting more messed up than he ever had before he finally getting into rehab.

Nate is one of the scarier patients in how much he reminds myself of all the possible me’s. Maybe had I stayed with the wrong friends a little longer, had people not come into my life at certain points… I could see myself in his shoes, especially when we talk Pink Floyd albums and our favorite live shows.

Sue D.

Sue is about 40 years old and from bayous of Louisiana. She had been nearly catatonic for the past three days before I spoke with her, sleeping nearly all day every day after her arrival. She was outside smoking with Liz, a worn woman of similar age but with the stress of life deeply engrained in her face who I believe to be the Mystery Scatter. The Mystery Scatter has been leaving foul droppings wrapped in linens in the ladies restroom trashcan and shower.

Liz had taken Sue under her wing the way a sick animal nurses a smaller sick animal to health in the same den. It was a horrible and potentially explosive conglomeration of neurosis’s… a Mystery Scatter and accused thief taking on the position as friendly elder and egging a woman on to continue sleeping eighteen hours a day. Nothing good could come from that.

I sat down next to Sue after the incident with Seth. After dinner I had regained my composure and went back to dealing with patients - she happened to be the first. I started asking her questions about where she was from. The dam burst open.

She accused late-night staff of being apathetic to her late night crying, accusing one of them of telling her to stop wallowing in her self pity. Her whole story was on the verge of coming out.

Her story really involved two people, her angelic and innocent seventeen year old daughter who had been raised in a very protective environment. The second actor was the kid next door whose parents had nearly abandoned him for being a “bad seed.” As so many sick people do, she took him in and acted as a surrogate mother.

The neighbor kid joined the services and had come home after boot camp for final a final goodbye. He stayed with Sue that night.

Sue heard crying that night. She walked down the hall to and heard it coming from her daughter’s bedroom. She was being raped. She had been a virgin.

Once back at school, her daughter was teased for it by the other students. An accomplished member of the school’s marching band, she refused to participate in her final recital out of embarrassment. In the eyes of the school, she was merely that girl who had slept with the neighbor boy.

Sue fell back on the pain killers she had for a prior surgery. It’s pretty easy for addicts to get extra pills from their family doctors… pain is something that can only be measured by the individual feeling it. Most doctors won’t fight a patient who says they merely want to feel better.

It got bad, such that her daughter was taking care of her.

“You can stay here, Mom. I’ll take care of you,” was one of the last things her daughter told her before she left.

“You don’t need to take care of me anymore. That’s my role. It’s time for me to be a mother again.”

I had the talk with her that I have with most patients that have family issues. You have to leave it all back at home for a little while. The only way they’ll get better is if they spend this time focusing on themselves enough to fix themselves. Focusing on fixing a marriage or the pains that brought them to addiction while they’re supposed to be focusing on the addiction itself is a shortcut to relapse.

It’s a hard, if not impossible, yet entirely necessary task.

“You’re here to fix yourself now so you can deal with that stuff when you get out.”

It’s a hard argument to make. Forget about your failing marriage, except during the ten minute phone call every night. Forget about your hurting daughter, except when the group therapist asks about it. Forget about how much you hate being in some clinic in the boiling Florida heat away from your friends and family.

I told her it’s like trying to get to an emergency in an ambulance. You’ve got to open the door, get in, turn the ignition, and drive there. It’s an ordered process, with a necessary first step. Her first step was getting “clear.” She didn’t like the words sober or clean. Once “clear,” then she could be the mother she needed to be to a wounded daughter.

Seth L.

Seth is eighteen years old. I don’t remember where he’s from. When I first started working at the clinic, he was community leader running the community meetings and the 12-Step Meeting (an Intro to AA/NA type environment). By all accounts, he was the model patient.

The first time I talked to him I was in his apartment over at PHP, which stands for Partial Hospitalization and is the final step before entering a halfway house or the real world. His roommate was Charles, a patient about my age from Chicago with my same major – only on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but respectfully so. I had promised to bring him a Russell Kirk book, but I was later told not to by staff.

I had just gotten done making my final rounds at the main men’s apartment building. All the men were lounging around in their apartments watching a Michelle Pfeiffer movie before lights out. Then I got to Seth and Charles’s apartment, which was in another building that was halfway renovated. Theirs was a little different from the rest.

Seth and Charles were sitting across from each other silently reading with the TV off. The smell of something cooking in the oven was strong.

“Would you like some cake?”

It took me a moment to respond back, “sure…”

In my short time at the clinic, it was always me running around doing favors for the patients – warming up meals, finding silverware, finding out what nurses want, when can they get their extra cash, more cigarette’s etc..

Seth fixed me a slice and I sat down and talked to both of them. Charles and I had a mini-debate-type thing a couple days before that poli-sci major’s do that isn’t so much confrontational as exploratory. Never negative feelings attached… it’s more or less a checklist. We walked away mutually impressed – that’s when I offered to loan him the Russell Kirk book. Kirk is a fine conservative writer that most conservatives have never heard of. I hadn’t had a chance to speak with Seth.

I joked with them that I felt that I had just stepped into my grandparent’s house, which turned into a nickname that stayed. I found out that Seth was in for Oxy’s, common for the younger people at the clinic.

I didn’t see him again till two days later. I was assigned to take him back to his apartment after dinner so he could get his things and come back to the main facility. He was on “watch.”

I helped him get his things at his apartment. He had a new roommate who was asking him what was up. “The changed my meds and want me over at the main facility,” he lied.

On the drive over he told me he was on suicide watch. We talked for a little bit about depression and suicidal thoughts. I told him my take on it, how I’ve coped with strong depression in earlier years. He told me how be bottled everything inside. He asked me what the cost of living was in Jacksonville. He wanted out of his hometown so he could start over. It was his own sister that got him hooked on Oxy’s.

Back at the facility he slept. I didn’t see him again until the next day. I was outside by the lake with a bunch of the smokers and was walking to peek around on the side of building where some other smokers congregate to make sure a tech was there. There was. But there was also Seth. I hadn’t seen him since him awake since he’d been transferred.

He looked horrible. He was sitting by himself in the parking lot staring at the ground. I started walking his way.

Just as I sat down next to him another tech walked up to us and said, “time to go." They’re free time was coming to an end and they had to choose between doing homework – largely writing their autobiographies and reading 12-Step books – and doing meditation

“I’ll get him inside, can you give me a couple minutes?”

“No,” the other tech said. I gave her a look to let her know I was serious. Seth looked like he needed to talk to someone, not go sit in a room while a therapist read calming words. He needed to get some things out and no someone gave a damn, not spend more time in silence.

The other tech went for my boss. They immediately dispatched with Seth. They laid in on me for what seemed fifteen minutes. They told me I was being manipulated by Seth. “All addicts are the same, they lie and manipulate.” That offended me on two levels, the first being the lumping together of everyone with a drug problem as treacherous sociopaths and the second being them ignoring that I had made an informed decision without his immediate input. I saw him from across the parking lot and made the decision to talk to him.

I did tell them right away that I would do as they say. I’m on their payroll hired to institute their program. They were in positions of authority and I do as I’m told when on the clock.

That wasn’t good enough. I had to believe them that taking three minutes to talk to him was deleterious to his progress. I couldn’t though. Not right then at least. I knew the success rate of any rehab clinic is something between five and thirty percent. Two thirds of the patients will wind up abusing again. Who the hell were they to override common sense to stay within the guidelines of a failed program?

Something caught my boss’s attention and she had to leave the conversation. I walked off. I cried. I can’t even say exactly why. I can't remember the last I cried... but there I was on the dock out by the lake trying to stop the tears.

I went to her office today and told her it was because I empathize. Seth is a kid I could easily see hanging around my friends and I. He’s not just a random abuser, he’s a smart kid caught up in some bad stuff and wanting to get better. He’s scared as hell. My protective instincts and natural response to someone in that situation were completely overridden without even a moment’s consideration to confirm to a pretty ridiculous standard of timeliness and order that no staff member exercises in their own life.

It hurt though. That was very unexpected. I didn’t realize I was being as emotionally drawn into the patients as I had become.

Phil D.

“At some point, you look in ya boxers and ya see grey, man,” Phil said outside on the picknick tables that the smokers congregated at. He, Eric and I were all sitting out there before lights out. They were joking with me about the “looking busy” remark I made when they asked me what I was doing.

Phil’s humor had been a source of contention for us in past days. A tall, very heavyset older black man with a budding fro from the casino country of New Jersey, I first met him I was to drive him to the hospital using a company van for the first time. I looked all sorts of nervous behind the wheel of a two ton van - eye level eight feet off the ground behind a an enormous V8.

“I drive a little Japanese car, Phil. It’s like… 4 inches off the ground. Stick shift. This thing is huge.”

My confusion and fear of driving the machine was a source of limitless humor to Phil. As I sat in the car about to pull out, adjusting myself to the new driving console, another employee came to me and told me she needed the van and would drop him off.

Phil got out, ran to another patient he knew, and immediately began his story about how I almost killed him by running the van into a ditch. The obvious lie of the story, coupled with the fact that only he and I knew the truth, bothered the hell out of me. snapped on him once or twice catching him telling the faux story hours and days later.

I had made an effort over the past few days to get cool with him. I don’t want any lasting negative tension between any client and myself, even if his humor was on a different level from my own… even if that meant just dealing with him talking about how much he missed “wet dreams” or fretted the graying of his pubic hair.

We were talking about addiction right before the joke, about me needing to make sure his window was closed so he couldn’t sneak out. It was just house rules. People have done it before. He told me what I’m used to hearing by now – a junkie gets what they need no matter what we do. I told him it was our job, at least for the time being, to make getting drugs and alcohol difficult and such that if you do try, you get caught and kicked out of the program.

He went on though, ignoring my reasoning. He had something else to say, and like a good politician he retorted to the argument he wished I had made.

“I don’t drive a car back home. You know… we find what we need. Find a bike that’s unlocked. A dope-head knows another dope-head when he sees one. He jus’ axks till he finds a someone to tell him where a seller his, then you gotta find a needle. But you find what you need, boy.”

“I’m too old for this shit,” he told me. He had been to several programs. He showed me the thick scars reaching towards his wrest from his the underside of his elbow. “I work wit’ kids. They see that kinda shit… the axks about that kinda stuff.”

Clark B.

Clark is a shell of a man. He’s a tall white salesman with horrible posture and my grandfathers glasses. He’s any neighbor. He’s your friend’s father. Except broken.

“I don’t have a family anymore,” he replied when I asked him if they were supportive. It’s a standard question I ask patients to get them talking.

Family support means a lot to them, but they have extremely limited access to phones at the clinics. Detox patients, those still on prescriptions to ween them or slowly getting their “drugs of choice” out of their systems, can only make phone calls on speakerphone with their therapist. For the rest of their stay they get one ten-minute phone call a day to the outside world. I’m slowly realizing why – this is their time. There’s nothing they can do about crumbling marriages and estranged children inside the clinic. This is time to get cleaned up so they can deal with all that stuff when they get out better than they could have when they were on a binge.

“One of my daughters stopped talking to me six months ago. The other is about to graduate, I don’t know when,” he said in his quiet voice. He’s one of the hardest to understand patients. He speaks very quietly. His libido has been chipped away with each loss. He’s merely going through the motions now. All he can do now is stop the thanatos, further self-destruction.

He, another patient, and I had a conversation about alcoholism once. Rick wanted to know, like a lot of the patients, about my own background with drugs and alcohol. I tell them a stripped-down version of the truth – I did a lot of reckless things when I first got into college overcompensating for having a completely straight-and-narrow high school life. I got out of senseless excesses when I got out of the dorms, though I am still a social drinker.

Rick, the other patient, told me for him it started like that. At some point he found himself getting home from work an hour before his wife got home. He’d pound six beers before she came out. He’d have three around her that evening. Mowing the lawn took two hours because he kept a stash of beer in the shed. Clark agreed, in his silent way, and conveyed his story of keeping a bottle of vodka in the garage and in the shed.

”Alcoholism is really about lying and deceit. I used to pack all my beer bottles at the bottom of the recycling bins so no one could see how much I was drinking,” Rick told me at the end of the conversation.

Late tonight Clark came up behind and put his hand on my shoulder and thanked me for finding out the date of his daughter’s graduation. He had given me the school name the day before and I told him I’d find out online when I got home, so long as he didn’t tell anyone how he got the info. There are a lot of rules stopping me from doing “favors” for the patients that pay my salary. It was the first time I’d seen any warmth in his eyes since I’d met him. He said he thought he might be getting out in time to make the graduation. I told him it was nothing - he would have done the same for me.

Daniel H.

Daniel H. is from town. He should be far away like everyone else is. He drove in, which means he’ll probably drive off at some point. Daniel was maybe 40, but twenty years of coke added ten years to his skelatol frame. He had two arrests in the past 24 months and this was his second rehab. He had strange crustations, scabs, and cuts on his hands. Strange war wounds for a professional photographer.

We talked cameras a little. I always try to find the common denominator between me and the patient and work from there. It works out well. He’s using the same camera professionally that I intend to buy as the first step in my three-step post-graduation plan.

The intake forms had me asking him how often he used. “Once a week.” I questioned further, wondering how a guy who only used once a week was talking about coke messing up his life as bad as it was. I told him how it seemed most coke users did it a couple times a year or a couple times a day without a lot people in between.

Well… one day to him, he clarrified. He was staying awake for five days at a time. He told me how his girlfriend was a little better. She could do a couple lines and go to sleep. She would hide the rest of her stash. He wasn't like her, though. He would spend the rest of the night trying to find her cache once he ran out.

Beer was his trigger. Three beers and he’d have to find some coke.

He missed his Narcotics Anonymous meeting yesterday and his sponsor arranged everything. Oddly, that was my first NA meeting. I had to drive a van full of patients from the apartments to the NA meeting in his neighborhood. Funny how things work out like that.

John P.

“I’ve got a life. I can’t fuck up anymore, man,” John P. told me as he loaded his laundry. I had sat down to rest after finding him some laundry detergent. It had been a hectic day. I needed a break after running around between facilities all day. John needed to talk and I needed to sit down. It worked out well.

“The therapist says to take things one day at a time, but, man, I can’t. Yesterday I was thinkin’ ‘bout today and today I’m thinkin’ ‘bout tomorrow.”

I asked him about his family, whether they were supportive or not. He has a wife with a baby on the way – two days before his birthday. His mother can’t understand how her only son came to drugs. But she’s supportive. His wife is exceptionally supportive, having offered him two options. The first was her killing him murderously, the second being rehab. “She had that look in her eye and I knew she wasn’t fuckin’ around.”

I asked him how he got mixed up in this stuff. It took him a second to gather his thoughts before they spilled over a mental dam of pride – a wall that had been deconstructed over the past week for him. He had been a pot smoker for some time. The real problem was crack, though he was giving it all up. He had gotten into a fight with his wife after she threw him a birthday party two years ago. He went out that night and found a prostitute, who introduced him to crack after he smoked a blunt with her. He never stopped.

He had hid it for a year and a half. His wife found out six months ago. That’s when she threatened him with an imminent death if he didn’t go to rehab. This was John's first time in rehab, and probably his last. He’s not like The Kid at the apartments in for his fifteenth time. The Kid who loves to shoot up coke and heroin and oxy’s - this is just a breather for him. The Kid talks about the taste of cocaine after an injection the way a mother would talks about her love for her child. The Kid wants to hit up Bourbon Street the night he gets home. John is different. John wants to teach his son how to ride his bike and play baseball.

I patted John on the back and told him he was a good man before I walked off.